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The Eternal Sunshine of Protein Synthesis Inhibition

Published by Michael Scott on October 6, 2011.

Why do people dwell on bad memories? We talk of memories being “scorched” or “branded” into our brains. The phrase “there are just some things you can’t unsee” has gone from being a joke to part of the lexicon

This phenomenon drove Freud, who had written The Pleasure Principle, to write one of his darkest books, in which he moved the furthest from his neurologist roots: Beyond the Pleasure Principle. He considered it “uncanny” (unheimlich) that people would continue to scratch a psychic wound, and speculated about a “deathly” instinct. There seemed to be little he could do for these patients.

An article published in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010 looked at recent research on “memory reconsolidation” and sent me in search of the original sources. In short, in remembering something, you (or proteins in your brain) “rewrite” the memory.

Consolidation of memory

For more than 100 years, we’ve known that memories move through an unstable phase to a stable phase, at which time they are said to be consolidated. During the unstable phase, memories can be impaired by distraction or new learning. (They can also be impaired by protein synthesis inhibitors—we’ll get to that in a moment.)

For example, think of trying to remember a phone number. If someone just told you the number and then begins to recite other phone numbers, rattle off random series of numbers, or the phone rings, you’re less likely to remember it. However, if the same reciting, rattling, or ringing occurs the next day, you’ll probably still remember that phone number.

For a long time, that was believed to be that. Memories went through a stabilization or consolidation period, after which they could be “retrieved.” The analogies were always filing cabinets or computers.

Reconsolidation: the present in the past

Then a researcher named Karim Nader conducted a brilliant experiment, published in a letter to the editor of Nature in 2000. Basically, Nader and her group looked at rats that had been trained to associate a tone with a foot shock. When the tone was played, the rats froze in fear.

The next day, the tone was played, and a protein synthesis inhibitor into the amygdala, a part of the brain associated with learned fear. No foot shock followed. The day after that, the tone was played again, and the rats no longer froze in fear. The memory of the initial training was cleared.

Turns out that both the original consolidation of memories and the reconsolidation of memories require protein synthesis. As Nader put it, “Our data show that consolidated fear memories, when reactivated, return to a labile state that requires de novo protein synthesis for reconsolidation.”

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Total Recall? One of those “flashy memory erasing things” from Men in Black?

Not so fast.

But a decade of studies has shown that new learning and other distractions can lead to altered or forgotten memories, but only within a certain window after the memory is brought up. Your mind then lays down a “new” memory, based on current experiences, thoughts, personality, fears, hopes, and dreams.

New hope in post-traumatic stress disorder

Protein synthesis inhibitors used in rat studies are highly toxic, but propanolol (a beta-blocker) may interfere with protein synthesis in the amygdala. That may be why some people report feeling “foggy” when taking this drug.

However, based on the model laid out by Nader, a group looked at what happened if people with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were asked to recall the traumatic event in detail and then given propanolol. A week later, when asked to remember the traumatic event once more—without propanolol—the researchers measured heart rate, skin conductance (a measure of stress), and the electrical impulses in the “facial frowning” muscle (the left corrugator). All were much, much lower than a group that had received placebo the previous week.

So we’re not in a brave new world of designer memories, memory erasure, or vacations by memory implants. Not just yet. But Freud has been demonstrated wrong (yet again). People with PTSD have been helped. And who knows where this research will lead next?

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mtscott

What impact will follow-on biologics have for pharmaceutical marketers?

Published by Michael Scott on June 6, 2011.

The answer, like most things, is “it depends.” An important question remains to be answered: Are Congress and the FDA really going to declare “interchangeability” between an innovator biologic medication and a follow-on biologic? With interchangeability, you’d have a situation much like that with most current generic drugs. Brands will have a short time to recoup costs and will be competing with generics that can be substituted by a pharmacist without the intervention of the doctor.

Just a few short years ago FDA said that it “has not determined how interchangeability can be established for complex proteins.” The Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) states that “the current state of science is not sufficient to establish interchangeability for complex follow-on biologics.”

Follow-on biologics have already been approved, but not as interchangeable products
An explosion of generic drugs has resulted from the generic pathway established in 1983 by the Hatch-Waxman Act: Section 505(b)2 of the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act (FDCA), which allows for an abbreviated new drug application (ANDA).

According to FDA Guidance for Industry: Applications Covered by Section 505(b)2, an ANDA is “an application…where at least some of the information required for approval comes from studies not conducted by or for the applicant and for which the applicant has not obtained a right of reference.” In other words, the generic manufacturer can rely on published literature and the FDA’s finding that the original branded drug is safe and effective. The ANDA pathway generally does not require costly Phase III studies, but it was not written to apply to biologics.

In 2004, FDA stated that it could not reach a final decision concerning the approval of Omnitrope, a follow-on recombinant human growth hormone (rhGH) manufactured by Sandoz, through the 505(b)2 ANDA process (the application used Pfizer’s Genotropin as its reference). FDA felt that it was an issue that had to be settled by Congress because there was so much uncertainty in the scientific and legal issues surrounding biologics.

A response that continues to raise more questions, years later
Ordered by a federal district court to hold a hearing on the ANDA, FDA approved Omnitrope in 2006 but issued a 53-page “decision letter” addressing petitions from Pfizer, BIO, and Genentech requesting that FDA not allow this ANDA for a biologic (protein) product. At the very beginning of the letter, FDA spells out several items that its response does NOT address, including:

  • Interchangeability—Omnitrope was designated as a “BX” generic; these are “drug products for which the data are insufficient to determine therapeutic equivalence”                            
  • Scientific issues with protein products, especially those not well-characterized by currently available analytical techniques (rhGH was considered by FDA to be “extensively and adequately characterized”)

In addition, Sandoz had conducted three original Phase III trials in pediatric patients with growth failure. So this decision did not establish a precedent.

Fast-forward five years
The Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act, signed into law in 2010, attempts to provide a pathway to interchangeability for biologic medications in general, despite the fact that—as far as I know—researchers have not solved the issues wisely avoided by FDA in 2006. The law as written states that the follow-on biologic must show data from “analytical studies that demonstrate that the biological product is highly similar to the reference product notwithstanding minor differences in clinically inactive compounds.”

For FDA to declare a follow-on biologic “interchangeable,” the manufacturer must show that “the risk in terms of safety or diminished efficacy of alternating or switching between use of the [follow-on] biologic product and the reference product [innovator or brand] is not greater than the risk of using the reference product” alone.

Follow-on = Me-too?
Right now, it seems to me that the only way to demonstrate interchangeability (lack of additional risk) would be through large, costly Phase III studies. The price of entry into manufacturing biologics is high, so the steep discounts seen for generics will not materialize (follow-on biologics could easily be 80%-90% of the price of the original). And given the fact that it may be reckless, in the current state of knowledge, to declare a follow-on biologic “interchangeable” (allowing substitution without the knowledge of the physician), will patients and physicians choose a 10% discount for a “biosimilar”?

So the situation won’t be remotely comparable to generics, if science prevails. You’ll be looking at biologics that are based on an innovator product, priced at 90% of the original, with no automatic substitution. Unlike chemical “me-toos” (new brands in a class, such as statins), follow-on biologics will not be able to promote better efficacy or safety. I think for now, biotech innovators have little to worry about, and follow-on biologic manufacturers face an uphill battle.

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mtscott

Cringe-worthy ideas, memes, and topics of discussion

Published by Michael Scott on May 2, 2011.

This month, I’ve decided to come up with a list of ideas or things that make me cringe when they’re abused, misused—or even used at all.

  1. Twitter as a valid marketing platform for pharma
    With the DDMAC ruling on Google Adwords ads that effectively killed the “one-click-away” rule for fair balance (if such a “rule” ever existed), what in the world are you going to accomplish in 140 characters. Conan? Oh, yeah. He kicked Jay Leno’s unfunny butt all over Twitter (Conan: 2.6 million followers; Leno: about half a million). But pharma? Except for Novo Nordisk’s updates from a sponsored IndyCar driver with Type 1 diabetes, I can’t think of how it could work. And nothing on the Twitter page or tweets can be branded. It’s a Twitter feed for a branded IndyCar. Great idea, and probably the closest anyone can come to branded content on Twitter. Or am I totally off-base? Let me know.
  2. QR codes; 2D barcodes
    Don’t get me wrong. QR codes are very cool, as my brilliant colleague Leigh Householder points out. Or as I’ve pointed out myself. (Actually, they’re 2D barcodes—QR codes are just one type, invented by an affiliate of Toyota in the early 90s to track shipments.) In Japan, where the QR craze started, they’re realizing that these codes aren’t all that. What do you do on TV? In busy train stations? In many ads, they’ve begun using search box mock-ups with suggested search terms, which bring up paid and natural search terms across major search engines. Even when Entertainment Weekly uses Microsoft tags to access movie previews, it can be easier to simply use Google or YouTube—or go to the movie site. Unless you’re doing augmented reality of a building in real time like this, complete with tweets from the occupants, don’t ask me to use a finicky 2D barcode app to pull up a website or streaming video.
  3. Like us on Facebook; check us out on Facebook
    What are people going to do on your Facebook page? It better be good—and I mean “something-I-couldn’t-possibly-do-on-your-website” good. And if it looks like you simply dumped your website into Facebook, don’t bother. Don’t poke me, bro.
  4. Branding as the solution for everything
    When the New Orleans murder rate was the highest per capita of any city in the developed world in 2004, and then climbed another 30% by 2007, what did city leaders do? Why, they launched an international branding campaign: “Forever New Orleans,” complete with taglines such as “Soul is Waterproof” and “New Orleans Is Open. To Just About Anything.” According to OBD: Obsessive Branding Disorder: The Illusion of Business and the Business of Illusion, “Branding is more distraction than progress. Real change results from innovation that advances knowledge and improves the quality of our lives.” It’s not that branding has no place; it’s just that not every business problem is fundamentally a branding problem. It may be a marketing or advertising problem (not the same as branding), a customer engagement issue, or a research and development problem.
  5. “Overwhelming agreement” among 6 people or so
    Among a group of 6 people, there are 20 ways in which the group could be divided 50/50 on an issue, according to The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives. But there are a total of 22 ways that the group could be 4-2, 5-1, or 6-0 in favor of your issue, and an equal number of ways they could be against it. So if you somehow knew that in the real world, people were evenly divided on the issue, there is a 2/3 chance that a focus group of 6 people will steer you wrong.

What makes you cringe? What makes you want to run out the room screaming that no one gets it? And which of my “cringe-worthy” notions am I completely mistaken about?

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mtscott

Back to the future: Using search box mockups to drive website traffic

Published by Michael Scott on March 31, 2011.

No one searches for a link through the address bar. No one. Never.

Think about Google. People use the search box to navigate to a site, not so much to search. For my favorite sites, it’s quicker and easier for me to type a search term (“opinion journal,” “pubmed,” “Netflix”). And with Google recently downgrading “aggregator” sites (those that ride on redistributing content supplied by others), the exact site I want is even more likely to come up at the top of the results. It’s an extra click, but often far fewer characters to key in.

Convergence of the address bar and search box
At the same time, the address bar has become a place to search, not navigate (but “search” in the sense outlined above, where you really only want one result, maybe two). Browsers have acknowledged this fact: Look at the Firefox “Awesome Bar” or the Google “Omnibox.” Each is designed as a limited search, or maybe a slightly expanded navigation. Either way, it shows that in UX, more choice is not that great.

Search box terms as calls-to-action
I wrote before about how Japan invented and popularized the 2D barcode (popularly known as the QR code, one of the more popular types). But now it appears that Japanese ads are taking an old-school approach: placing mock-ups of search boxes, with suggested search terms, as the call-to-action in ads.

This ad shows a search box with a cursor hovering at the ready over the search button. Just above the search box, in black, it reads (roughly), “For those who wish to apply on the internet…”

Ad using search box as call-to-action

What’s interesting is that inside the search box is the simple term “banking.” How sure of your ranking would you have to be to put a term this broad? Maybe not so sure…

The future looks a little like the past
Something more akin to AOL keywords than QR codes is now all the rage in the country that invented QR codes.

One writer has found an ad that suggests searching on a word that means “deeply, beautifully.” He entered the terms and found that Google and Yahoo both had top-page paid results for an apartment complex. Another example asks readers to search on “bank best,” which leads to top and side paid ads on Google and Yahoo.

Another excellent post suggests that “URLs are totally out,” replaced by search box mockups—especially on trains and TV, where QR codes wouldn’t really work that well. He provides a page full of examples.

Would this work for natural search? (Some of the suggested search terms apparently do come out near the top of natural search results.) Could someone outbid you for a term the moment an ad went out? What’s the recall on these key words? (It has to be better than a URL with a redirect.) Does it make sense in English? (Japan has 3 alphabets in addition to kanji, or characters, so there can be confusion in searching—and address bars accepted non-ASCII characters only fairly recently.) And when will we see more TV ads telling us to search on a certain word or phrase?

And how could it help drive traffic in pharma, with all of the restrictions on paid search? You give customers suggested search terms (memorable, but not violative), and they find your paid ads at the top and sides of Google or Yahoo. (Maybe even in natural search results.) In turn, your paid ads don’t have to have as much information, because the user is already looking for your site. Even if they don’t arrive at your (perhaps cryptic) paid ad from your TV or outdoor ad, if your search term is memorable enough, they may think, “Oh, that goes to that site for [drug name].” And just like that, paid search is back in play for pharma.

I have family visiting Japan soon, and I’ll ask that they take photos for more examples. I’ll read through them, check out where they lead and how they’re used, and report back.

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mtscott

5 Things Pharmaceutical Writers Should Know

Published by Michael Scott on February 3, 2011.

Okay, full disclosure. Despite my posts on various aspects of usability, unbranded websites, affordance (does a user know intuitively to click, hover, swipe, or drag?), skeumorphism (formerly functional elements that have now become ornamental, like “page-turning” on a web page), and QR codes, I’m a medical writer.

What is a medical writer? Good question. If you went to the American Medical Writers Association website, you’d think they write new drug applications and clinical study reports. In other words, PhDs in biochem who can write, at least for clinical applications.

I don’t do that. I think I could, but when I was in grad school, I wrote papers such as a Heideggerian reading of the metaphors in Joyce’s Ulysses. I’ll find it if you’re having trouble sleeping. (That was after I had switched over from cognitive science, dominated by Chomsky, to comparative literature, dominated by Derrida. Chomsky’s thought has aged much better.)

Then I found a job in advertising, and it was goodbye, $800/month stipend and helloooo…well, a little more than that. To paraphrase Bluto in Animal House, 7 years of grad school down the drain.

Soon, agencies started getting pharmaceutical accounts, and no one knew what to do with them. I loved it. I got to read science, write copy, and get paid. I occupied that hybrid space between creative and medical. I work with writers who don’t always share my appetite for the science, but who do exceptional creative work. So what should they know, at a minimum?

  1. p-values: These simply tell you how likely it is that your results could have occurred purely by chance. The standard significant p-value (p<0.05) means that there is less than a 1 in 20 chance that the study results could have occurred completely randomly. Nothing biologically special about it. Sir Ronald Fisher proposed it as a cutoff in a 1954 paper, and it stuck.
  2. AMA style: Yes, the editors will catch errors, but when everyone on a team knows, for example, that journal articles are italicized or that there are no spaces between the year, date, issue, and page numbers in a citation, it can avoid extra rounds.
  3. Good scientific writing: One of the best writers in evolution, ever, was Stephen Jay Gould. Today it’s Richard Dawkins. Read Matt Ridley, one of our best writers on genetics. Read Michael Gazzaniga on consciousness and the brain. Read The Best Science and Nature Writing 2010 (some of the best medical writing now appears in Wired magazine). Get a subscription to Scientific American. View the TED Talks on medicine.
  4. How to read a PI: Highlights at the front. Efficacy in section 14. Safety in section 6. Know, for example, where to find how many people discontinued pivotal trials, and why. Know what claims your PI can support.
  5. Support claims: Perhaps paradoxically, the harder the science, the easier this part usually is. “Soft” claims around diet, exercise, and lifestyle—such as those that appear in newsletters—can be difficult to reference accurately or to a review board’s satisfaction. And know what DDMAC thinks about bringing up certain topics. Five years ago, adherence issues were fine. Today, you can barely go near adherence.
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mtscott

2D barcodes and augmented reality buildings point to opportunity for pharma

Published by Michael Scott on December 27, 2010.

In 2006, I went to Japan to help localize an intranet for a major pharmaceutical company. Nothing about this portal for managing your own career fit naturally into Japanese culture.

Having lived in Japan for 4 years, I could see that we would have difficulties right from the word “career” itself (which had to be borrowed from English as “ka-ri-ru”). Other cultural and linguistic problems involved the merit-based system replacing seniority, the necessity for employees to speak up to managers and take control of their own careers in a culture where “the nail that sticks up gets hammered down,” and the appropriate translation of various buzzwords such as “competencies,” “skill set,” or even “promotion.”

Here a QR code, there a QR code, everywhere…

But as I walked around, I noticed something that had changed in the time I had been away from Japan. This was almost 5 years ago, but it seemed that almost every ad, subway poster, store sign, package, fast food wrapper, or business card—pretty much any flat surface—had “QR codes.”

I had no idea what these strange shapes were. But one member of our group—the user experience architect (guru, actually)—explained what they were and lamented that they were not yet used more widely in the US.

A typical QR code

Actually, QR codes are the most common type of 2D bar codes. Normal barcodes are 1-dimensional: they can only store information along a single linear axis. (By the way, in Japan a bad comb-over is referred to as “bar code hair.”) But 2D bar codes can store information in 2 dimensions (horizontal and vertical). They were originally developed in Japan by Denso-Wave, an affiliate of Toyota, to track parts in vehicle manufacturing. “QR” stands for quick response, since these codes were developed to be quickly and easily read by scanning equipment.

Continue reading ‘2D barcodes and augmented reality buildings point to opportunity for pharma’

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mtscott

Skeumorphism and affordance and in medical writing

Published by Michael Scott on November 30, 2010.

Why do suburban houses have plastic shutters screwed next to the windows? Why do many of those windows have false muntins (white lines dividing the windows into 9 or so sections)? Why do book pages on an iPad appear to “flip” to go to the next page (even when it’s exquisitely rendered)?

These are all skeumorphic elements; derivative items which retain ornamental design cues to a structure that was necessary in the original. Shutters used to keep windows from breaking during storms. In the 19th century, it was more expensive to make one large pane of glass than to stitch multiple smaller panes together using wooden muntins. You used to have to flip pages; the Kindle now refreshes instantly and keeps you in the immersive experience of reading.

Just like enormous, shatterproof panoramic windows that no longer require shutters to keep them from breaking, the book is now more than it was. An electronic book allows you to look up words, see how many other people have highlighted a particular passage (for better or worse, making reading less the solitary endeavor it has always been), or search for key passages.

Reference numbers, skeumorphism and affordance

Do we need still need reference numbers in electronic sales aids? Are they merely skeumorphic remnants of paper articles that required references to be in a particular order, correlated with a reference list?

Or do they provide affordance? Affordance basically means how much an object communicates what you’re supposed to do with it and what happens next. With good affordance design, the user realizes that he or she should click or push or pull or swipe or drag, and what he or she generally expects to happen next, happens.

Sometimes interactive skeumorphic elements are a way to enhance affordance by bringing in familiarity from the outside world. Early web design had rooms, pathways, campuses, etc. These days, websites are no longer thought of as virtual versions of real-world spaces. But the vocabulary of affordance remains skeumorphic: buttons to push, sliders to drag, windows to open, links to other objects.

Why is a medical writer venturing into user experience territory? Because there are so many conventions in medical writing and referencing that we often take affordance for granted.

A colleague recently asked me about replacing reference numbers in electronic sales aids or websites with a small graphic element that would remain the same throughout. The reasoning was that the same graphic element could lead to any reference as a hover-over, preventing hours of writer and editor time spent re-correlating references every time something changed during development.

It made me realize how closely the concept of affordance and skeumorphism are linked. Without familiar, skeumorphic reference numbers, our physician audience might not know what to do with that new graphic element. At least not right away. But why not have a single graphic element for all references? References no longer have to take you to a list, so numbering is no longer an issue. If your cursor turns to a hand over the image, you’ve included an affordance clue. After all, putting links in blue and underline—the classic example of affordance—wasn’t always immediately recognizable.

When designing electronic medical materials—whether websites, sales aids, or articles—how can you break free of skeumorphic design that’s limiting your thinking? How can you provide visual affordance in a new way while offering something more: instant access to tables, original articles, other relevant materials? What in your work is the equivalent of window muntins, no longer providing anything but ornamental value?

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mtscott

106 of my new favorite things, thanks to Google

Published by Michael Scott on October 28, 2010.

You gotta check this out. Google Labs put it together and calls it the “creative internet.” You’ll call it amazing. If you do anything interactive, there will be something in here to inspire, challenge, or amuse you—or make you flat-out envious.

It’s long and you could spend days lost in the jaw-dropping awesomeness of much of this work (when you’re not showing your colleagues). So here’s a quick guide.

Audio

Live, free, crowdsourced Radiohead videos. A Japanese robot straight out of a teen anime fantasy performs “live” in concert. An infographic guide to buzz on Grammy-nominated artists. Personally, I’m torn between the in-your-face “look-what-we-can-do/how-did-they-do-that?” of the Arcade Fire music video experience (slide 5) and the beautiful simplicity of “in bflat” (slide 11).

Video

One day, one world, as experienced by thousands of people: Life in a Day (slide 18). The world turned into a game of tetris, space invaders, pong, and more (slide 24).  A crowdsourced Star Wars made up of 15-second cuts (slide 27).

Vizual (infographics)

If you read my last post, you’ll know I’m interested in wayfinding and the presentation of information. As Google Labs says, “We now generate and organize more data than we can begin to imagine. The next problem is how to see it.” See it in the abstract beauty of cities mapped only by local vs tourist photos (slide 31).

David McCandless shows that information really is beautiful—and more informative when it is. Understand the dimensions of your world, whether you uncover the “immapancy” caused by school years spent studying Mercator projections or truly grasp the dimensions of the 2010 Pakistan floods (centered in Ohio, they would have cut a swath hundreds of miles wide from north of Montreal to the Gulf of Mexico). And don’t miss the wonderwall (slide 38).

Art

Dreams really are created by Electric Sheep (slide 41): computers communicate to share abstract animations, building an “android dream.”  Virtual sculptures—small alternative realities, really—exist in their own spacetime (slide 46). Photos taken throughout the year are expressed as a visual flow of colors (slide 49).

Physical

Bodies dance to projections mapped by light (slide 56). Water in a fountain moves in a way that can’t be described and would only be demeaned by the phrase “dancing water.” Text messages are flung by slingshot (slide 63).

I haven’t even gotten to light (such as a holographic touchscreen), tech (a headset that controls an interface using brainwaves), politics, sports, books, history (what did Manhattan look like in 1609, block by block?), and advertising (tag a Facebook showroom image first and it’s yours—tagged photos quickly spread through profile pages, newsfeeds, and links).

All I can say is, these are now a few of my favorite things. And some of them will soon become your favorite things. Oh…and wow!

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mtscott

Wayfinding: Designing information for great customer experiences

Published by Michael Scott on September 27, 2010.

Ads are designed, packages are designed, cars and buildings are designed, cities and maps are designed. What many people don’t know is that information is designed, and just how it helps us find out way.

What’s the point of design? Basically, it’s to let the user know what to do next. Yep, all of the items listed above convey brands and emotions, but as I’ve said elsewhere, brands and concern about “brand awareness” often remind me of that joke: “But enough about me! What do you think of me?”

A better question would be, “What sort of experience are you having every time you come to our site, talk to one of our representatives, use our products, try to get more information about our products, or simply try to figure out how to get reimbursement help from our company?” In part, your brand emerges from the answers to those questions. A great example of brand emerging from a retail experience—in this case, customers assembling their own custom bicycles—is shown in the experience designed for Mission Bicycle customers by Adaptive Path.

Subway maps: what do you leave out?

What do I mean by designing information and wayfinding? Well, if I dropped you in the middle of Tokyo with only the map shown, it wouldn’t be long before you’d be on your way to wherever you wanted to go.

What is it about this map that makes it so easy to follow? As Peter Morville says in Ambient Findability about a map of the London Tube, it “sacrifices reality for simplicity, presenting memorable paths, edges, districts, nodes, and landmarks.” Each subway line has its own color, and junction points are clearly identified by color, line symbol, and station number.

What’s not included is just as important as what is. Exactly how far is it from Otemachi to Shinjuku Station? I don’t know, but I know how to get there. After a day on the subway, I’d be able to estimate the time it would take between stations, even though no scale is provided. Where are the parks? Where are the fashion districts? Where can I find the latest electronics? It doesn’t matter. I can find that information in other places.

Morville notes that, “…the impact of [environmental] legibility goes beyond wayfinding; it shapes people’s image of the city. Getting lost in a city can be frustrating and scary. Frequent negative experiences hurt the city’s brand. In contrast, landmarks that combine form and function by serving as beautiful wayfinding tools can greatly enhance a city’s image.”

Errr…you were talking about customer experiences?

The next time you write anything, think of what your audience needs to know.

  • Can 5 pages of bullets be transformed into a simple chart?
  • As in the map of Tokyo, which information is better suited for other places (such as an appendix or footnote in our case)?
  • How do you simplify? For example, real subway stops are not colored oval boxes, junctions don’t have thick lines around them, and actual railway paths are not as uncomplicated as shown here. In other words, developing wayfinding tools involves making tough decisions.
  • If you have charts and graphs, are there more interesting—and elegant—ways to present them (without introducing what Edward Tufte calls “chartjunk”)?
  • How can you make your charts and graphs appealingly interactive?

You can find a nice interactive example of the effect of streaming content acquisition costs on Netflix profits here. Now imagine a similar chart portraying the effect of BMI on lipids or blood glucose, weight loss on knee load (for osteoarthritis), or family history on cancer risk. In each case, you would have to simplify some aspects of the interaction and work closely with your medical/legal teams, but the results could have great impact.

Information design is an important focus for artists and designers. But it’s an art we should all understand. Medical writers—all good writers—should be thinking of wayfinding and information design from the beginning of any project. Where does your audience want to go, and how can you help them find their way? (Special thanks to Denise Leo for inspiring this post.)

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mtscott

Being better is a strategy for failure (and brands are a relic)

Published by Michael Scott on August 2, 2010.

I have a Rio Cali mp3 player. Have had it since 2004. It had a whopping 256 MB capacity, and an optional 500 MB SD card brought it to ¾ GB. But the sound was great, and it held enough songs for running. My little Cali used a single AAA battery, ran forever, and had flash memory. I sweated on it, dropped it (more than a few times)—but the only thing that could do it in was my change to a 64-bit operating system.

Why? No drivers, no support.

Why was the iPod everywhere?

It seems Rio had long ago been eclipsed by the iPod, which first came out in 2001. There were 5GB players 2 years before the iPod, like the PJB-100. There were indestructible little flash-drive players like my Rio Cali. But they all tried to be “better” in some way. More and more memory. Smaller and smaller form factor. Radios. Voice recorders.

I despised the iPod. Its hard drive made it useless for running. Its proprietary battery meant I might as well buy a new one every year. It was pricey relative to the competition. As someone who researches and obsesses over every technology purchase, it made no sense to me. But there it was, everywhere.

Experience as strategy

I learned why from the best marketing book of the past 5 years—Adaptive Path’s Subject to Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World. In it you’ll learn that being the best is not a strategy.  That way of thinking hearkens back to the world of industry when “businesses sought technology, features, and optimizations to maintain or increase an advantage over their competitors. But the value of investing solely in those things has reached an end.”

So what takes the place of being better? Experience as strategy. Does your product mesh with “the way people move through their lives”? Before the iPod, how did people get songs on an mp3 player? They ripped them from CDs and used a program to convert and move them to the player. Apple’s genius was in empathizing with its users. What did they want?

As Subject to Change puts it, “Apple clearly had an experience strategy for the iPod from the outset: all your music, any time, anywhere…In fulfilling this goal, Apple’s genius wasn’t the design of form or interface, but in the design of the entire system that supports the media consumer.” They placed functionality across the system where it was appropriate: the iPod let you play music, iTunes let you browse and add audio, and the Music Store let you buy media. No extraneous functionality on the iPod—no radio (clashes with the strategy of your media), no voice recording (who uses that?), and no wifi until iPod Touch (when it made sense with the strategy of your media, anywhere).

Not about brand

The iPod and its experience brought Apple back into the limelight. It was not that much of a “brand”—best remembered for its breakthrough 1980s ads from 20 years prior.

Remember the Apple Newton? It made the mistake of stuffing unnecessary features into a large form factor. The inventor of the Palm Pilot, on the other hand, carried a block of wood that matched the size of his colleagues’ shirt pockets. When anyone suggested new features, he challenged them: where would it go on this block of wood? Again, the thought was always about how people moved through their lives with the device.

Adaptive Path makes it clear that an experience strategy is not a brand strategy. Brand begins with the company: here are our values, here are our attributes, and here’s how we project them to consumers. Brand, they say, is rooted in 19th- and 20th-century manufacturing of making and selling products. Brand is still important; however, “products aren’t interesting in and of themselves, but only as interfaces to larger systems.” Experience strategy is “about contributing to a desirable experience, helping people accomplish what they want to get done.”

So the next time you think about what you or your client wishes to project to a consumer, turn it around. Empathize! First of all, who cares what you want to project? Second, will you get far if you view people as consumers (ie, a simple means to make a profit)? What are your customer’s motivations and behaviors? What context do they live in? What do they want to accomplish today? How can you design an experience that will help them get it done? How can you help them move through their lives a little more gracefully?

Categories: Break-through advertising
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